The Reception of William Blake in Europe ed. by Sibylle Erle and Morton D. Paley (review)

Blake, Blejk, Блейк, Mπλέηκ. Since there is only one recorded mention of William Blake outside England before 1800, in a French dictionary of artists published in Leipzig in 1789, a book about his reception in Europe only tenuously belongs in a journal of eighteenth–century studies. But Blake himself certainly does, if he "belongs" anywhere, as he was born in 1757. Though several historians have thought he would have been more at home in the seventeenth century, among the Ranters, Diggers, Quakers, and Muggletonians, he himself kept up with current events in Britain, France, and America, and produced quite a bit of poetry about them, with his own engravings, such as America: A Prophecy and Europe: A Prophecy. Living all but three of his seventy years in London, he seems to have known, or at least met, quite a few of the writers, painters, and political agitators of his tumultuous era. Excellent books and commentaries have been written about his many connections to his time and place. But then there is something about him that makes him seem timeless and placeless and available to everybody now and everywhere, despite his famous obscurities and reputed madness. As the essays in this big anthology attest, many people throughout Europe have felt he belonged peculiarly to them. The same is true in Britain, of course, and the rest of the Anglophone world. It is my impression that many people—students, "common readers," poets, painters, hippies—may acknowledge this or that poet or painter as greater than Blake, but they love Blake. He speaks to their condition, as the Quakers say, and they don't care much about what London was like in 1780, whom Blake knew or read, or how he engraved and colored his copper plates. Academic literary scholarship on Blake today, as it is on every author and artist, is resolutely historical and contextual, and so it is that this collection gives the history and contexts of Blake's arrival in country after country even as it repeatedly attests to how he was divested of them as he arrived.

It took a long time, well after his death in 1827, for his reputation to extend much beyond London book–illustrating circles. Coleridge admired his Songs, "The Chimney Sweeper" was anthologized, "The Tyger" was known, somehow, and late in life Blake acquired a small set of disciples who admired his engraving and painting. But a biography of Blake by Alexander Gilchrist in 1863 was subtitled "Pictor Ignotus," and, as the editors of this collection point out, Blake was just as ignotus as a poet. It was only at about this time that some poets, such as Swinburne, began to celebrate him, and then Yeats and Ellis brought out their edition in 1893. As Gennadii Alekseev was to write in 1976, eighteenth–century England "doesn't take notice of Blake," but nineteenth-century England—"Hooray! It has noticed William Blake! / But strangely / Blake had already left England / and settled in Paradise" (translated by Vera Serdechnaia and Evgenii Sedechnyi in their chapter). By and large, of course, it took longer for him to be discovered on the Continent, though it is interesting that the first five or six European notices appeared in Germany during Blake's lifetime, thanks in large part to Henry Crabb Robinson, who read Blake with some care and travelled widely in Germany. The first French notice dates from 1830; that in turn was translated or paraphrased in Russian in 1834.

This anthology is extraordinarily thorough in its reach. There are separate essays on Blake's reception in nineteen countries, from Ireland to Turkey; a few countries are considered in pairs, while Russia gets two essays and Germany and Austria share three. They are all well-researched and competently written by experts who have lived in the countries they write about and speak the languages. Dividing the book up into discrete...